Let’s not delude ourselves here: Apple’s iPad event was spectacularly dull. There was one interesting feature of the new iPads — but it was relegated to a page on the Apple website, rather than shown off on-stage. It’s called the Apple SIM, and it’s the death knell of the humble — if rather annoying — SIM card.

New photos of Nokia’s upcoming Android handset, code named Normandy, have leaked — and rather oddly, it appears the standard Android UI has been stripped out and replaced with something that looks a bit like Windows Phone. In a separate leak, it would appear that the Normandy hardware design, which looks almost identical to a Nokia Lumia handset, is near-final. It would seem that, despite the imminent finalization of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia, this rather odd device is still on schedule to be released this year.

Unlocked does not necessarily mean what it used to mean when it comes to Samsung’s newest smartphones. The company has started using region locking to control its supply chain more tightly, and that can mean a headache for users.

It took a long time, but the humble SIM card that sits within your phone, and seven billion others, has finally been hacked. Of the seven billion modern SIM cards in circulation, hundreds of millions are estimated to be susceptible. The hacks allow a would-be attacker to infect your SIM with a virus that sends premium text messages, or records your phone calls — and, in some cases, access the secure, sandboxed details stored on your SIM by mobile payment apps, giving a hacker access to your bank and credit card details. Now that a proof of concept has been demonstrated, we wouldn’t be surprised if billions of other SIM cards are also vulnerable to other attack vectors.

The GSMA has been pushing for years to have NFC-enabled SIMs as an industry standard in mobile. At this year’s Mobile Asia Congress, it got its wish when 45 heavy-hitting telcos committed to making the dual-purpose cards a standard. With the ease of SIM cloning that exists nowadays, will this open up a Pandora’s box of security issues?

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